New Defender's Study Bible Notes

6:20keep. The connotation of “keep” is “guard.” The Christian faith has been committed to us in all its purity and saving power. We must guard it against all attempts to distort, dilute or deny it, for these would destroy it.

6:20vain babblings. “Profane and vain babblings” (that is, secular and pointless philosophizings) are to be utterly avoided, not in the sense of fleeing from them, but rather of not being influenced by them, and by rendering them void, refuting them with truth. The intellectual and political establishments are rife with humanistic philosophies and programs of all kinds. We must beware of them all (Colossians 2:8), guarding the integrity of the Christian faith in every detail.

6:20science falsely so called. “Science falsely so-called” is, in the Greek, literally “pseudo-science” or “pseudo knowledge.” This pseudo-science is nothing other than evolutionism, which has been in “oppositions” against God as Savior and Creator and the world as His creation since the beginning of time. In Paul’s day, it mainly took the form of Epicureanism (based on atheistic evolutionism) and Stoicism (based on pantheistic evolutionism). It soon would take the form of Gnosticism and later of Neo-Platonism, both also assuming evolution. In other parts of the world, it had the form of Taoism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or Buddhism, all based squarely on some form of pantheistic evolution and an infinitely old cosmos. In recent times it assumed the form of Darwinism, though men are now returning again to various forms of eastern religion and their systems of pantheistic evolution, still rejecting God as Creator and Christ as Savior. Yet all forms of evolutionism are pseudo-science at best, filled with “profane and vain babblings.” Note the following summary of current scientific evidence against evolutionism.

1.There is no present evolution; only horizontal variations and extinctions.

2.There was no past evolution, only ubiquitous gaps between basic kinds in the fossils.

3.There can be no possible evolution, since universal laws of conservation and decay now govern all natural processes.

4.There has been no time period long enough for evolution, because historical records go back only a few thousand years, and the fossil record speaks only of rapid formation.